Woman Pulls 14 Live Worms Out Of Her Eye And Doctors Say They’ve Never Seen Anything Like It

Native New Yorker, University of Virginia graduate, runner, and sometimes stand-up performer.

About a year and a half ago, Abby Beckley thought that she just had an irritated eye — but it turned out to be so much more.

According to CNN, the nightmare started when Abby boarded a commercial salmon fishing boat in Craig, Alaska. About a few weeks into the job, her eye started getting irritated and droopy. She was also suffering from migraines.

She suffered like that for five days before she finally found a good mirror to take a look at what was going on.

“So I pulled my eye kind of down, like this, and I looked in that bottom little crevice, and I was like, ‘Something looks wrong. Maybe I have a piece of fuzz stuck there,'” Abby told FOX 12. “So I went like this, in like a picking motion, and I felt something in between my fingers, and I pulled it out, and I looked at my finger, and it was a moving worm.”

At first, she thought it was a salmon worm, and she saw doctors. But the physicians had no answers for her: They had no idea what kind of worm this was.

Abby returned to her home in Oregon, where she made an appointment at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. Doctors there were having just as much trouble identifying the worms because they were so elusive, and every chance she got, Abby picked them out herself.

She ended up pulling out 14 of them. Some were sent over to the CDC, which is how she was finally diagnosed with Thelazia gulosa, a type of eye worm seen in cattle in the northern US and southern Canada — but never in humans.

It all started to make sense: Abby hadn’t contracted the worms while on the boat, but on her ranch in Oregon, where she has a cow.

There is good news: Abby pulled out all the worms and is now doing just fine!